WHY WE ARE NOT AGAINST COAL

Excess deaths of coal over nuclear by industrial accidents: 685 per year. Black lung: 22,400 miners totally incapacitated at any given time, with 1,367 new cases each year, and $1 billion/year in payments to victims. Excess deaths of the public due to air pollution: between 9,000 and 22,400 a year.

It is stunning figures like these conveniently ignored by every hypocrite from Margaret Mead to Ralph Nader that make us friends of nuclear power. But they do not make us enemies of coal.

Yes, coal is deadly, especially when the sheer quantity of its use is considered, and when all the lost lives are added up (at least it does not, like oil and gas, have the capacity of killing thousands in a single disaster). And unlike the utilities, who are tongue-tied on this point because they are critically dependent on coal, we shall not hesitate to say so.

But there are at least two reasons why we are for coal, too. One is that we cannot do without it; we cannot afford to have only the best (nuclear, now only 8% of electric, and less than 3% of total energy consumption), and to spurn second-best. There are no other viable substitutes for oil and gas, whether imported from abroad or kept underground by the policies of Congress and the Ford administration. Solar can supplement. but not substitute; wind, tidal and geothermal cannot contribute more than 2% of total consumption.

The other reason is that there is one thing more deadly than fossils: lack of energy. Energy is the lifeblood of an industrialized society, and if it is lacking, it matters not whether the absent energy is nuclear or fossil-fired.

What happens to an energy-starved economy? No need to go as far as the death rates and poverty levels of Bangladesh or Ecuador; just take a look at a single statistic of the past (present?) recession in the US: It was accompanied by 4,000 additional suicides per year (National Suicide Council estimate, quoted by Dr B. Cohen).

Yes, coal kills more people than nuclear in generating the same energy; but coal, like nuclear, saves more lives than it takes.

Of course, unemployment and lack of energy will not hit everybody equally. The affluent elite that makes up the leadership of the environmental organizations will not only be able to afford the thousands of dollars to invest in small-scale energy conversion, but they also have the acreage where to put a 10-ft diameter solar collector or windmill. Their callous indifference to the position of the common man only makes their hypocrisy more despicable.